So, some of you may already be aware of this, but it’s something I just learned.

If you have links to any external site on your posts, THEY WILL NOT SHOW UP IN TUMBLR’S SEARCH FUNCTION.  So if you’re like me and fastidiously put links to your deviantart, patreon, and other sites and accounts on every art post, nobody searching within tumblr will ever see your posts unless they actually cross that user’s dashboard somehow. 

I searched for some terms that should pull up many of my art posts; ‘1000 days of doodles’ for example.  I’ve, naturally, got hundreds of posts with that tag.  While two of my blogs themselves showed up, not a single one of my 1000 Days of Doodles drawings appeared. :x  I deleted the links from one post, and bam!  there it was in the search results. ._.  Edited them back in, and it was banished to the shadowlands again.

Reading various posts on the topic, I guess it’s been this way for a long time, and tumblr doesn’t seem interested in fixing it.  I’m trying not to think of the potential internal traffic I’ve lost in the past two years of obsessively putting links to my other sites in almost every single art post, as it’s useless to speculate, but it’s a depressing thought.

One clunky workaround is to post the artwork initially without any links in the description, and then add the links in the reblog.  It’s better than nothing. :x

I’ve got over a thousand posts with links in, and I don’t really feel like editing them.  Maybe I’ll get swept up in the current purge and won’t have to deal with it. 

(If I do, you can find me as amarynceus on twitter, deviantart, and elsewhere.)